iron man

doo, doo, doo-do-do, dodee-dodee-dodee-duh-doo-doo-doo.

Er, that's supposed to be a sort of sing-along version of the riff to Sabbath's Iron Man.

Well, anyway, moving right along...

I've never been that big a fan of Iron Man.

I've read the comic a few times, and Marvel are great ones for crossovers, so I've encountered him sometimes in the other books I've read. I dunno - he never really appealed to me, I guess. The thing I liked about the superheroes I tended to follow was that they were more along the lines of greatness-thrust-upon-them.

So I really liked Spiderman - an nerdy kid who has superpowers thrust upon him. He struggles with life just as much - if not more - as he does supervillains. I also really like Wolverine.

Wolverine always had the air that he was dragged into being a superhero because some internal moral compass could never stand to see bad triumph over good and only he could fix it. If he could, he'd happily step back and let others fix it, but when it came down to it, he did what needed to be done.

I also used to like the Punisher. I've not kept up with the newer versions, but the Punisher again was very much like Wolverine. The Punisher tended to deal in real-world crime of course, but there are a lot of similarities again.

One of the problems with Iron Man for me I think was the whole aspect of him being a weapons dealer. It was never clear to me quite how that worked - in the comics he still traded weapons (I think), yet in his spare time he was a vigilante superhero?

Also, the whole rich playboy aspect jarred with what I preferred. Spiderman was a nerdy kid who had to work to pay his bills and struggled with girlfriends, Wolverine I guess had a benefactor in Professor X but was a difficult, surly character who was difficult to love and Punisher could only leave by using the money he got from organised criminals he killed and of course had no love in his life since his family was murdered.

Tony Stark could buy half of the planet and was so damnable handsome, he could have any woman at the click of his fingers. Yeah, great from a power-fantasy point of view, but not my cup of tea.

What they cleverly do in the Iron Man film is iron out all of these issues.

So he's a weapons dealer, but he undergoes a crisis of faith, as it were. He becomes the victim of his own weapons.

He's a shagmonster, sleeping with all and sundry, but then we get to see he's actually probably in love with someone and it's suggested he shags around because he's lonely.

Now to some extent, these ideas are a little familiar, but this is where story telling and execution become of paramount importance. I mean, think about it - how many adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have there been? And, more relevantly, how many works "based on" those stories?

See, the point often isn't necessarily to do something new, but to do it well. And here they really did it well.

The cast is just about perfect - Downey Jr is brilliant as Tony Stark in particular. The effects in particular are spectacular - CGI has so come of age you virtually can't tell it's CGI anymore.

Also, there's a perfect blending between humour and seriousness, just the right amount of action and the right pitch in terms of tone and pathos.

It's not quite as good as Spiderman 2, but this has got to be up there amongst the best Superhero movies I've seen so far.

What's especially interesting is that the deleted scenes are on the disc as extras and I think that every cut they made was right. Sometimes you watch the deleted scenes and think - oh, they should have left that in as it explains better or whatever, but here everything they chopped out made it better.